


Symmetrical Irony

by FleshDust



Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Hotel
Genre: Anal Fingering, Blood and Gore, Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Dark, Demon Sex, Demons, Explicit Language, Hate Sex, Haunting, Horror, Love/Hate, Misogyny, Multi, Non-Consensual Voyeurism, Pain, Painful Sex, Physical Abuse, Psychological Horror, Rough Sex, Sexual Violence, Torture, Twisted, Verbal Humiliation, Violent Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 13:25:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14261940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FleshDust/pseuds/FleshDust
Summary: Again she suffers when He punishes her for her sins, and again she cannot help but to love it and hate it. And this time, Mr. March wants to watch her being punished.





	Symmetrical Irony

**Author's Note:**

> This is an addendum to my other AHS: Hotel story, [ Penance and Symmetry](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4993345). I recommend that you read it before reading this one.
> 
> Or not, it's not like there's a profound plot or anything, just a lot of un-beta'd messed up shit.

“Sweet pea, you want another?”

She looked up at Liz (Cleopatra today, technically, but the initial name she had learned was stuck now), and shook her head.

“No thanks, Liz,” she told her, pushing her empty glass that had contained a delicious and wondrously pink cosmopolitan across the sleek surface of the bar.

The woman winked at her as she grasped the slender stem of the cocktail glass.

“Isn't that just the best Cosmo you've ever had?”

She smiled at the woman who she now knew as Liz. They had gotten to know each other better after the last time He had come for her. He had savaged her so badly, worse than ever before. She could only recall snippets of it.

His pale, featureless not-face, somehow hateful and tender at the same time. Horrible agony, white and blinding, and depraved lust, dark and explosive. Black claws, stabbing, striking flesh and bone. His shiny steel cock, brutalizing. Breathing blood and weeping salt and between her legs, paroxysms of roiling pleasure.

Afterward, she could not do anything but lie on the carpet that smelled of mildew and shit and expensive perfume, her body broken and blood thickly gurgling in her throat. A couple of guests, whom Liz had called ‘hipster brats’, had walked by, engrossed in a conversation about chia seeds and organic kale. They had spared her one glance, huffed, and walked on.

Her lungs had been speared with her own ribs and her back was a latticework of gore, courtesy of His talons. When she tried to moan, if only to voice her agony, she felt the impotent grinding of her broken jaw. Blood was fleeing her body at a rate that would kill her. Or would have, had she not been... not-living.

It had been strange, to lose so much blood and not succumb to it. She had felt her thoughts becoming smaller, her body becoming colder, and her heart only twitching in her chest. Why would it even twitch, since she was not alive?

She wasn't alive.

But the agony and pleasure of His assaults made her _feel_ alive. At the time though, she had wished for death ( _another_ death, technically), because it had never been this bad before.

Liz had found her again, her mien horrified but not all too surprised.

“He's been in a weird mood lately, I hear,” Liz told her as she kneeled next to her and stroked her cold, clammy brow.

Her soft fingers kept petting her head until her flesh started to odiously weave together and mend itself once more.

Once she had been able to stand, Liz had taken her to a nearby empty room and sat down on the bed with her, holding her as she sobbed against the emerald-green sequins that the older woman had worn that day.

The woman, once a strange hybrid creature to her, was now just Liz. She had realized at that time that she had likely been not-living for longer than she knew, for when she was truly alive, wives stayed in their homes, fussing over their offspring and the wrinkled shirts of their men and cooking pot roast with potatoes and carrots. Toxic green gelatin for dessert. Slippers in hand when the husband came home.

She had never been a wife or a mother, nor had she ever wished for either, which had been frowned upon when she was alive. Marriage, as it were, revolted her. The thought of breeding children did the same, even more so.

She had been the spinster, the whore, the slattern who sometimes slept with their husbands; the latter mostly because she found a sadistic type of joy in showing these kept women just how fragile the cage of their holy matrimony was.

Sometimes she pitied these women, who had to regularly spread their legs for these husbands, most of whom knew little of how to fuck other than flopping around on top of her like bloated, clammy fishes.

Oh yes, she was the harlot who did what harlots did and she was the heretic who did not dutifully attend church in her Sunday best. Religion, more than anything else, disgusted her, and that, on top of all else, cemented her status as a pariah (other than the times when some husband or another patted her ass carefully, looking for something on the side).

Bring a pariah was just dandy with her, she had little interest in fellow humans overall.

But she had realized that times had changed while she had been dwelling in this place. She was not sure how much time had passed. But now, no one cared cared much about people like herself, who did not find marriage or breeding or church appealing.

No one cared much about people like Liz, people who were women but had been born as men (that's how she understood it, anyway). They were both different, in their own ways.

After she had gathered the courage to ask Liz about these things and found the woman more than willing to explain the details to her, she found herself content and enjoying the older woman's company.

There were others she sometimes encountered, dead and living and beings in between, but none of them were as kind to her. She couldn't blame them, not really. They were all eating their own bitterness in the halls of the Hotel Cortez.

As she had sobbed in Liz’s arms, she caught a tiny wisp of a scent from her, the scent of sweet perfume and aging flesh. It made her think of her grandmother, and it made her feel better.

And eventually, her body finished its usual reconstruction. She felt flesh and skin close anew, snapped tendons slithering along bones until they found their moorings and anchored there. Her broken jaw swiveled back into its original position with a crack that made Liz jump.

She laughed at the older woman’s reaction, mostly relieved that she could, once again, laugh. Liz tittered a bit after she had overcome the initial shock of the gruesome sound.

“Baby, you're like a Rubik's Cube,” she chuckled. “Turn here, turn there, twist clockwise three times… and done!”

She had laughed along with the older woman, and after that, they had begun a tentative friendship. They often conversed at the bar where she now sat, still tasting tart cranberry and vermouth on her tongue.

Liz had even made her remember her name. It had been strange, really, but she hadn't thought of her name for so long, and no one had asked for it where she now dwelled, a prisoner of the Cortez.

She had just been her, that girl, that whore, but Liz had finally teased her name out of the cobwebbed corners of her brain where things were squirreled away, but rarely forgotten.

“Charlotte, that's a pretty name,” Liz had told her. “But I'm going to call you Char. The first four letters of my favorite color of green, chartreuse!”

A wrinkle of annoyance had speared between Liz’s eyes as she added: “There's chartreuse yellow, too, but oh, the green…”

The little wrinkle dissipated.

“... Galliano for Dior, a chartreuse and turquoise dress that Gwen Stefani wore for a Bazaar shoot… that's what dreams are made of!”

Charlotte smiled at the memory (not that she even knew who this Gwen or the other people were). She reached for a pack of cigarettes that sat on the counter and fished one out, accompanied by a lighter.

“Best cocktail I ever had, Liz. You really make the best…”

Her words trailed off as she felt it. She dropped her unlit cigarette and the gold-plated lighter, sending it clattering along the counter. There was a strange tugging in her belly that she had never experienced before, an unhinged, inexplicable need to move, to obey this unknown compulsion. She got up from her bar stool in mid-sentence, prompting a quizzical look from the older woman.

“Is everything alright, doll?”

“I...I don't know,” she replied, frightened, trying to resist the queer urge to ambulate even though her brain had not ordered such an action.

“Something… something's happening, it's like… I'm being pulled…”

“Pulled?” the older woman parroted.

“Yeah, something is… something is forcing me to… I don't know, go somewhere.”

Liz blanched slightly at that, the cocktail glass that she had been polishing forgotten. She lowered her eyes, her golden eyeshadow glinting softly. It was frightening. Liz never avoided her gaze, not ever.

“Liz? What's happening?”

“Someone's calling you.” The woman whispered, eyes still downcast.

“What? Calling? Who… why?”

“I don't know, baby girl, but you'll follow and find out. You have no choice.”

And then the older woman's face twisted in on itself and dissolved into swirling confetti. Charlotte screamed with horror and reached out to where Liz’s face had been, but it was as if her body had been swallowed into matter itself, a dark place where everything meshed together into a chaotic reality that was not to be comprehended by the human mind.

She saw small glimpses of the muted colors of the hotel wheel overhead like dirty ribbons and stairs crumpling into themselves like balls of paper. A sensation of being in an elevator churned in her belly, that strange sucking-pulling feeling at the bottom of her gut.

Sounds, so many sounds were crammed into this swirling darkness, the sounds of weeping, of misery, of ecstasy and brutality and suffering; the mad laughter of some rotting thing dancing on spindly legs and the soft singing of beautiful dead children. And then the chaos oscillated violently and spat her out into a place that was not the place where she had just been.

There was no Liz, no bar, no glasses glinting softly in the amber light, only an opulent, yet somehow decayed apartment styled in the same fashion as the rest of the hotel, if not more so.

And there, on a chaise lounge, a man was reclined, smartly dressed in a brown pinstripe suit, well-groomed with slicked-back hair, neatly trimmed moustache and carefully manicured hands, holding a cigar and a nearly empty glass with an olive bobbing sadly in the clear dregs.

The man speared the olive with a toothpick and popped it into his mouth, smiling thoughtfully as he chewed.

His face should have been beautiful. But in it she somehow saw death and decay, the suffering of countless beings, and the frolicking of demons around the stinking, burning bodies of penitents. In his face, she saw torment and shit and blood.

In his face, she saw the hotel itself.

She knew this monster without truly knowing him. She could feel who, and what he was. He was the Cortez. And in the Cortez she dwelled.

_James Patrick March._

“There you are, my dear,” he said after the olive had been masticated. “I've been waiting for some time.”

“What?” she squawked stupidly.

She really wasn't able to think of anything better to say.

“I've been waiting. It's rude to keep people waiting.”

Without waiting for her to reply, he made an exaggerated, flourishing gesture with his hand, the cigar between his fingers creating dancing swirls of smoke in its wake. A few dead flakes of ashes drifted to the floor.

“Say,” he drawled, “I find myself in the mood to indulge my ocular facilities today. Hence why I called you here.”

“What?” she said again, confused and completely dumbfounded at the bizarre turn of events. “I don't understand.”

“My dear, I would very much like watch you suffer at the hands of my confederate.”

A faint klaxon went off in the corners of her mind, crying a warning. She knew instantly who this monster before her was talking about. The _other_ monster.

“He is fond of you, for some reason. I can't imagine why. A home-wrecking harlot like yourself. Tell me, how deliciously ironic is it that after seducing the husbands of so many women, and disdaining such unions, you are now only bound to one man? Well, I wouldn't call him a man, really, but you understand my meaning.”

He stretched languidly, the starched fabric of his suit rustling slightly.

“The demon and the harlot… I suppose it does have quite a nice ring to it.”

Charlotte hissed with anger at this man, this terrible murderer and his disgusting mustache that slithered about on his upper lip like some black, anemic caterpillar when he spoke.

“And yet, no matter how much He hurts you, you love it. For all of your infernal caterwauling, you truly are His whore.”

“I do not love it,” she protested, knowing that it was the truth and a lie at the same time, “I _don't.”_

“Besides,” she sneered, “isn't this just a perfect example of the pot calling the kettle black. If we're talking sins, how many of them stain your own miserable soul?”

Mr. March grinned darkly at her, but before he was able to reply, the air in a corner of the room twisted and churned slightly, and He emerged from the dark, the shadow-tendrils clinging to Him briefly like wet leaves before they peeled off his slender, pallid body and returned to the black corner.

“Ah, there you are, friend,” Mr. March abandoned his cigar and clapped his hands together once. “I've brought your favorite whore. Would you be so kind and claim her?”

The demon advanced on her, skulking like some hairless cat. She let out a small shriek and jumped back as He lunged for her, and all He caught in His grasp was air and the lingering smoke of cigars.

He straightened slowly from the crouching position that He had fallen into after his failed attempt to get at her. Charlotte watched Him stalk towards her again, shoulders hunched, but before He could grab her, her fist connected with the side of His head. He had no eyes, no face altogether, but the way He cocked his head at her told her that she would not land a second blow.

And she didn't. Mr. March appeared behind her, wrenching her hands behind her back and rendering her defenseless.

Thus unhindered, the demon approached to peruse her clothed body. His hands squeezed her hips, then traveling upwards to cup her breasts, the pressure of His bruising grip around them increasing until she whined. When His fingers entered her mouth, tasting of death and blood and seed, she bit down on them, hearing the crunch shoot upwards into her skull.

The demon didn't react as a normal being would. Instead of yanking His hand away from her, He shuddered and seemingly relished her abuse. His body twitched and slick oil leaked from His pores to traverse the multitudes of scars and wrinkles that crisscrossed His skin.

Charlotte released His fingers out of a sensation of pure futility, and the damaged digits slipped out from between her lips. In her mouth was now the taste of His black not-blood.

He nodded, silent as ever, and went to the luxurious bed situated to the side of the room. The bedding was expensive, silken and brocaded with geometric designs to match the rest of the hotel.

“Mount him,” Mr. March growled in her ear. His breath was icy.

The demon laid down on the opulent bed, His black claws extended toward her and His narrow hips quivering in some type of sick anticipation. Mr. March grabbed the scruff of her neck, wrenching her head and dragging her to the bed where the creature waited silently.

“Now now,” he hissed, “mount him. Don't be such a bluenose, darling.”

She was beyond shocked when Mr. March brought his wormlike, cold lips to hers in a clammy kiss, his teeth sinking into her lips until she wailed, the sound muffled by his mouth.

Charlotte might have been fooled by the taste of expensive liquor and cigars, but behind it, she tasted damnation.

He withdrew then with a look of loathing and disgust, leaving her mouth bleeding and her fear spiking. She didn't even have the wits to protect herself at that moment when he backhanded her hard across the face, once, twice, thrice.

Her head was alive with ringing little bells as Mr. March threw her into the arms of the demon. Blood from her bitten and now split lips fell upon the demon’s scarred skin, creating patterns like maroon fireworks.

And her loins clenched with slick moisture as soon as she felt His marred skin under her hands.

“You taste of all the cock you've ever had in that mouth of yours,” Mr. March stated as he arranged her on top of Him.

Her green sundress followed with a startling ripping noise and she wasn't even sure who had torn it off her. Mr. March’s hands were in her hair again, yanking her up and then showing his hands under her arms, forcing her to straddle the being on the bed. Her lower body hovered precariously over the horrible, twisted steel between His pale, slender legs.

“Oh god,” she moaned, her fear choking her voice, and yet, she could feel how slippery her nether flesh was.

“Yes, this is your God,” Mr. March drawled at her. “Worship him, won't you?”

“Come now, friend,” he told the demon then, “spread that dirty cunt open and fuck it. I can smell how wet she is from here.”

Charlotte felt His greedy black claws tug at her, spreading her shamefully slick folds open, aligning His midsection and positioning the unnaturally hot steel at her opening. She had time for one more choked curse directed at the both of them, and at her not-life in general.

And then Mr. March shoved her down onto the white hips below her, and she screamed. Her body sank down on the conical steel appendage, her flesh splitting open around it by force of gravity. The demon’s fingers curled hard on her hips, and His white not-face tilted back silently with the cordage in His neck straining until she was painfully flush with the wide base of His cock.

“Ah yes, there we go,” Mr. March said, wiping his hands on the bed linens as if touching her had infected him with something.

He then returned to his chaise lounge to arrange himself artfully upon it, his eyes on their bodies and a cigar between his lips. Slender fingers retrieved a lighter and the cigar smoldered to life with little red embers. His moustache twitched cruelly as he leaned back with cold, hateful eyes.

“Fuck her,” he growled darkly. “Break her.”

There was no indication of arousal on the part of Mr. March. He truly regarded her as a diseased slattern, a parasite that he was not able to quash. But at least he was able to watch her suffer.

Charlotte groaned with the agony and pleasure as His hands descended on her, groping the soft meat of her behind, the claws pricking the skin. The first flick of her hips that He forced with His grasp made her cry out again. The second prompted tears to spill from her eyes, mixing with the blood on her lower face and stinging when the saline fluid reached her wounds there. The third one made her utter another scream, and then He started to thrust up into her in earnest.

Her hands went to grip His to get them off her, but her hips rotated treacherously by her own volition as He violated her again. His steel cock stabbed her until she felt the angry burn of savaged tissue and the slow sensation of blood trickling out of her to stain His groin red. The divots and ridges of His cock slipped against her swollen clit. The feel of her blood sliding hotly between their bodies only made it so much more horrible, and so much more pleasurable.

“Oh yes,” she moaned as one of His spidery hands crawled to her breast, claws digging into the soft mound, rolling precariously around a tightly beaded nipple.

She wasn't even surprised when He pinched her nipple hard, summoning fat drops of blood, and the pain of it thrummed throughout her body to make her loins burn hotter.

He kept fucking up into her, the gnarled steel hot and unbearable and so good as it violated her, damaged her, over and over again, and she could not help but relish it and hate herself and hate them all, but oh, it was so, so good. Her tears never stopped, but whether they were due to pain or pleasure, she did not know.

Charlotte uttered a tiny whine when He shoved her off him and onto the bed. He straddled her waist, the blood-flecked steel cock bobbing precariously close to her face. But all He did was to backhand her a few times, His hands leaving burning swaths across her face before He clasped her waist and flipped her onto her stomach.

“Yes,” Mr. March chuckled from somewhere, “debauch her thoroughly.”

And then she felt His fingers grab the halves of her ass, spreading her again and then the steel was being pushed into her once more, the raw nerves inside of her wailing as the ribbed steel raked them, yet all her flesh did was tighten around it and she groaned brokenly at the painful friction.

His thrusts were rapid and fervent as He straddled the backs of her thighs, His hands were fisting her hair, pushing her face down into the bedding until she could feel the burn of oxygen deprivation in her not-living lungs. Her mouth was dry and full of fine linen.

He bucked against her hard, their connected bodies making depraved noises as his white, scarred skin slapped against hers.

She saw a fuzz of movement in a corner some distance from the bed where the demon was fucking her. A flash of leopard, pale skin, red lips. _Sally._ The woman stood there, watching them, her eyes bleeding mascara as she wept and sobbed around the cigarette in her mouth.

Charlotte felt herself starting to drift into an unconsciousness that did not quite want to drag her under, to both her chagrin and relief. And between her legs churned the wet pain and the terrible pleasure, spreading her, stretching and fucking her open, stabbing her cervix and scraping ruthlessly along her butchered nerves.

One of His hands left her hair and soon His fingers were prodding at the tight ring of her anus. Three of them forced their way inside, itching and skittering along her spine like black, sharp bug legs.

After only a few thrusts of His fingers and cock, both sliding obscenely wet with various fluids, Charlotte felt a violent tugging in her lower belly that pulled tickling heat and cold down the lines of her groin where it clashed with the pain.

She came hard, her body undulating and her flesh clutching His so hard that it felt like her body might turn itself inside out. White flashes of dead aurora borealis blinded her as she screamed out her hatred and pleasure into the bedding and her body frantically pulsed around the intrusions of His appendages.

Mr. March cackled somewhere nearby, his tone mocking when he mumbled some filth that she hadn't the energy to listen to at the moment.

Sally wept louder in her corner, the planes under her eyes soaked with tears and smudged mascara. The woman had sunk down next to the wall, her arms hugging her knees, yet still she watched.

Charlotte found herself being turned around next, His steel cock sliding out of her, her tightened flesh protesting enough for His cock to cling hard at her insides before He managed to dislodge with an obscene, soaked sound.

She blinked and grunted in confusion as she felt His slender hips spreading her legs and slotting between them. He had never fucked her like this before, and her confusion only deepened as He rested his forearms on her shoulders, His hands cradling her face. She might have mistaken it for tenderness if she hadn't felt His claws digging into her cheeks as He pushed inside of her again. His cock slid fluidly and softly into her sleek and bloodied flesh.

And there, yes, she was wondering when this was going to happen. The punishment cruelly wrapped around the reward in the shape of His horrid cock, growing inside of her, lengthening and shredding and destroying. She found herself moaning as she felt it tangle with her innards.

She couldn't help but to clasp her arms around her abuser, drawing Him closer so that He could fuck her insides and damage her and puncture everything until she died and came alive once more. She hooked her ankles behind His thighs, wiggling her toes into the black straps that traversed the backs of them to pull Him further into her.

She felt his cock tearing through her organs with nearly imperceptible meaty noises, like overripe fruit bursting. And the agony and the sensation of being slaughtered was so spectacular that she came again, sobbing, the sounds arrested in her throat by blood and minced viscera.

Craning her neck and placing her hands on His head, she allowed her lips to slide wetly along the planes of His featureless lower face. Her blood smeared there, giving Him a facsimile of a twisted red mouth.

At that, Charlotte felt his His hips catch, His cock expanding and pushing her organs aside and something burning hot and abhorrent spilling into her. His fingers dug in hard, piercing parts of her cheeks until she could run her tongue along the insides of her mouth and feel His claws there.

There were no male grunts, no groans or growls, simply His white body stiffening and filling her with something thick until she felt it oozing around her ruined organs.

He withdrew then, His claws leaving her face and thumbing her chin briefly and His cock pulling out of her, black, hot seed slipping out from the grooves along its length. With it followed red and glistening shreds of her insides.

She couldn't remember seed factoring into their couplings before. And she tried to raise her head to look between her legs, but all strength had left her broken body, and even twitching was agony.

So Charlotte could not do much but to stay where she was, bleeding and dying without dying. The demon gave her one final not-look before He withdrew into the shadows and peeled away into nothingness.

She felt the mattress beneath her shudder, sucking down her agony and pleasure and blood into the dark bowels of the Hotel. She laid there until her body started to slowly heal once more, her organs sliding back into their places and wounds closing like little singing mouths.

“There we go,” she heard a voice in the distance, though it wasn't as distant as it sounded. “You really are his whore, aren't you, dear?”

Through a red haze, she saw Mr. March standing over her.

“Fuck you,” she wheezed.

“Yes, yes, you've got a foul little mouth, too. If you weren't already dead, I'd kill you for it.”

He whistled and waved the hand in which his cigar was pinched between pale fingers.

“Sir? Do you require fresh linens?” The Laundress appeared, impeccable as usual, clasping her hands.

When she clapped eyes on Charlotte’s prone body on the bed, her painted lips pursed with disgust. A red rose, curled with revulsion, only for her.

“Ah yes, Miss Evers, much obliged. Kindly get this tart out of here, and then fetch me the girl in number fifty-six. Alive, mind you.”

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“Yes,” he said, “fetch me my equipage, if you would. The mask, the knives.”

“Oh, yes sir!” The Laundress breathed, visibly and darkly excited. “Be back in a jiffy, sir!”

Charlotte simply laid there during their exchange, waiting as her body continued its lazy reconstruction, her mind an intoxicated haze of post-orgasmic pleasure and suffering.

Strong, soap-roughened hands grabbed her, and the Laundress dragged her out of the apartments. Her red hair looked like fire under the hallway lights. She dumped Charlotte’s damaged body some distance away from Mr. March’s chambers. The Laundress muttered something about harlots and sheets needing cleaning and tottered off, penguin-like, her prim black and white uniform doing nothing to dispel the image.

Charlotte laid there, naked, still bleeding, when she heard the giggling of the two Swedish women, their heels muted against the luxurious, rotting carpet in the hallway.

“Vad fan är det där?!” one of them called out, approaching her broken body where it laid.

The other one approached slowly and grunted in disgust.

“Det är bara den där varelsens hora,” she said as they inspected her more closely, pretty faces pinched with sadistic glee.

She felt a kick to her stomach and heard more giggling, but the pain barely even registered with her well-abused nerves. She only let out a small puff of obsolete breath, but before the Swedes could entertain themselves further, she heard a familiar voice.

“Get away from her!” she heard Liz shout, magnificent in her fury.

“Go on, get! Don’t you have some guy to drive insane? Stupid Swiss bitches.”

“We are Swedish, you old hag,” one of them riposted, but their voices moved off all the same, chattering in their native tongue.

“Yeah, well, this old hag’ll kick your bony asses,” Liz muttered to herself as she knelt down beside her.

She felt Liz's strong arms around her, and the woman helped her stand, wrapping a large, turquoise shawl around her shivering body.

The gesture was so kind. Liz was always so kind to her that it made her want to weep.

She allowed Liz to lead her through the hallways as soon as she could walk, her damaged gait awkward and shuffling, until they reached Liz’s room. Once there, the older woman helped her into the shower, washed her back and her hair, patiently slow as her damaged flesh finished weaving itself together again.

“Rubik’s Cube, doll,” Liz smiled at her afterward as they sat on the bed. She was clean and dressed in a robe that was too big for her but that was soft and smelled like Liz.

Charlotte smiled, exhausted and still sore.

“Liz,” she ventured, “can I, uh… can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

If she hadn't been so tired, she would have winced at the childlike desperation in her own voice, but Liz only smiled warmly.

“Of course, baby girl. You’re like the daughter I never had by now.”

They settled down to sleep, belly to belly, and the older woman even held her hands, clasping them softly between their bodies, at face level. They whispered about mundane things for a while, and Liz described to her, in great detail, the chartreuse and turquoise dress that she had once spoken about.

Charlotte drifted off to sleep, relaxed and content in listening to the older woman's soothing voice and smelling her breath, which smelt of smoke and maraschino cherries.

She heard tortured screaming not too far off, and she guessed that the Laundress had brought the girl in fifty-six to Mr. March. Somewhere, a dead baby cried for its mother, and the mother answered, singing lullabies not meant for the living. She sensed the spindly-legged thing in the basement, eating the dead that had been dumped there, lapping black, rotted blood.

And behind her eyes, Charlotte could feel Him crawling the space between the nothingness and reality, watching over her.

 _The demon and the harlot,_ she thought, holding Liz’s hands tighter, feeling the older woman's kiss on her forehead right before she fell asleep.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I'm fucked up in the head.
> 
>  
> 
> Translations  
> “Vad fan är det där?!” - "What the fuck (lit. Devil) is that?!"
> 
> "Det är bara den där varelsens hora" - "It's just that creature's whore."


End file.
